Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Funding Kickstarters for the Rewards

At ANIMAL, we give a fair amount of press to performances, bits of technology, and art pieces that are funded at least in part by Kickstarter. But once a project is funded, there’s little media coverage–by us or anyone else–addressing what the finished product looks like, how it performs, or whether it’s ever made at all.

CNN Money conducted a survey of the crowdfunding service’s top 50 projects, and found that only eight of them shipped on time, and 16 never shipped at all–meaning backers don’t see the product they paid to help fund, and likely won’t be receiving their promised reward either. Another study by researches at the University of Pennsylvania found even more damning statistics–75 percent of the 471 tech projects they surveyed failed to ship on time.

This being an art-centric website, however, many of the projects we blog about are art-related, which, as theVerge points out, tend to operate on a much lower budget, and are more likely to be completed successfully and on time. The moral, according to Kickstarter: when you fund a project, you’re not buying a project, you’re getting involved in the production process, and it may be subject to bumps in the road.

Brendan Iribe, the CEO of a marquee Kickstarter-funded company that didn’t deliver on time, offers some perspective from his side of things. “In the first 24 hours, everyone is happy and slapping your hand,” he said. “And 48 hours later, the reality sets in. There’s a bit of fear: We’re going to have to make all of these.”